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Should I give Arch a shot?

I’ve been using Linux as my main OS for a couple of years now, first on a slightly older Dell Inspiron 15. Last year I upgraded to an Inspiron 15 7510 with i7-11800H and RTX3050. Since purchasing this laptop I’ve used Manjaro, Debian 11, Pop OS, Void Linux, Fedora Silverblue (37 & 38) and now Debian 12. I need to reinstall soon since I’ve stuffed up my NVIDIA drivers trying to install CUDA and didn’t realise that they changed the default swap size to 1GB.

I use this laptop for everything - development in C/C++, dart/flutter, nodejs and sometimes PHP. I occasionally play games on it through Proton and sometimes need to re-encode videos using Handbrake. I need some amount of reliability since I also use this for University.

I’ve previously been against trying Arch due to instability issues such as the recent GRUB thing. But I have been reading about BTRFS and snapshots which make me think I can have an up to date system and reliability (by rebooting into a snapshot). What’s everyone’s perspective on this, is there anything major I should keep an eye on?

Should also note I use GNOME, vscode, Firefox and will need MATLAB to be installed, if there is anything to do with those that is problematic on Arch?

Edit: I went with Arch thanks everyone for the advice

aebletrae ,
@aebletrae@hexbear.net avatar

For someone seemingly so eager to try out new distros, I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned virtual machines. If the vibes are off, it’s a whole lot less disruptive to find out that way.

Your experience with drivers won’t be quite the same as a bare-metal installation, but checking out software shouldn’t be a problem.

CorrodedCranium ,
@CorrodedCranium@leminal.space avatar

Definitely. VMs are great for trialing distro and DE. They may not be great for demanding tasks like gaming without a fair amount of tinkering it should get you to the point where you can figure out if something is for you.

That said stability is a bit more complicated and I think a lot of that comes down to personal experience and long term community thoughts. Both are why I don’t use Manjaro anymore and the personal aspect is why I still love Fedora

ferngully ,

Arch is great. You’ve kinda dipped your toes in it with Manjaro already. I recently moved to EndeavourOS with BTRFS for my gaming computer and couldn’t be happier. I could have done stock Arch but I honestly didn’t care enough to. EndeavourOS has great sane defaults and no bloat. And you can pick almost any DE during the install. Spin up a VM and give it a try if you can.

I can’t speak to MATLAB though. But all the others you mentioned I also run.

The only issue I have right now is the half screen flickering with GNOME and NVIDIA drivers. But I just ignore it.

blackbrook ,

I’d recommend openSUSE Tumbleweed instead. They originated the btrfs setup that lets you rollback in the grub menu, which has been copied by others. They are bleeding edge except that all packages go through an automated testing system before being rolled out so there’s much less breakage to start with.

unionagainstdhmo OP ,
@unionagainstdhmo@aussie.zone avatar

How well does openSUSE Tumbleweed handle proprietary stuff like NVIDIA drivers?

AnUnusualRelic ,
@AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve been using it on my main box for a few years with a 1070 and then a 2080 without issues. Not that it means anything. I’ve never really had issues with nVidia despite running Linux for 25+ years and having used a fair number of their cards, but according to the Internet I’m the only one on the planet. So YMMV.

blackbrook , (edited )

There is definitely a caveat with nvidia. The nvidia repo is managed external to the main repos, so it is possible for a new kernel to drop in the system repo and the nvidia repo not yet be updated with a compatible driver.

I always wait a few days on such updates and watch the mailing lists for problems especially from nvidia users. So far I’ve only experienced problems due to prime wonkiness that required re-running a couple of prime commands. I haven’t had to use the boot-from-btrfs-snapshot yet, but it’s a nice security blanket.

Drug_Shareni ,

From what I’ve seen it’s far from bleeding edge. A few months ago I compared it to other rolling release distros and it was by far the most out of date.

blackbrook ,

Tumbleweed? Could you have been looking at Leap?

Drug_Shareni ,

There’s always a chance I messed up, but afaik it was tumbleweed. Although I was looking for some programming and niche packages, not something popular like Firefox.

drwankingstein ,

one thing ill say. flutter via aur is kinda a pain, I would reccomend installing the flutter package, not flutter-git, then adding it to ignore-pkg in /etc/pacman.conf then letting flutter handle updates

unionagainstdhmo OP ,
@unionagainstdhmo@aussie.zone avatar

Interesting, at the moment I’m using the snap package since that’s what’s officially supported, so I should probably stick to that (for simplicity)

drwankingstein ,

I myself detest snap, avoiding them whenever possible, the manual install method is also officially supported which is more or less what the aur does

chocolatine ,

P

hottari ,

Arch is bound to break every once in a while, that’s just the deal you get with a rolling release distro. If stability is all you want, you can go with the BTRFS snapshots and hope to heavens this setup doesn’t break or use something stable like Debian or Fedora.

original_ish_name ,

Everything is bound to break every once in a while, that’s just the deal with software that updates

KrankyKong ,

deleted_by_author

    •
    hottari ,

    Disagree. Arch is not stable at all, couldn’t be even if you wanted it to be.

    Bugs and regressions get introduced upstream all the time, these have a tendency to slip from testing into the main repos.

    Case in point, a recent glib2 update was causing NetworkManager to coredump sporadically.

    And you have to always use downgrade. Example, the newer 6.5 kernels break thermald 2.5.4 for me, so I have to downgrade a step downwards.

    Are these problems because of Arch? Not necessarily but the rolling release model has a role to play in these types of regressions & bugs.

    An LTS type of distro will face other different types of bugs. Outdated software libraries/dependencies that are rendered incompatible etc.

    But these are few and far between compared to rolling release where everything is in a constant state of change.

    superkret ,

    I literally never had a visible bug on Arch, whereas my last Ubuntu install greeted me with an error message because some part of gnome crashed right on first boot.
    I realize this is anecdotal, though.

    dino ,

    In regards to your original quesiton, I would like to know why you stopped using Void linux. Because to me its very similar to Arch in many ways.

    unionagainstdhmo OP ,
    @unionagainstdhmo@aussie.zone avatar

    I left it for Fedora Silverblue because I was interested in the immutable distro concept. Otherwise my main problems with it was the use of runit over systems, the small community when something went wrong and the lack of mainstream support. Otherwise it was a pretty good experience

    notTheCat ,

    As a fellow developer who recently moved to Arch, it’s great, the installation process was a tiny bit frustrating (I did test it first in a VM) but after that it works as intended, I keep my eyes on the wiki though if any issues happen, nvidia driver works well with PRIME too, although I don’t use it much (I dualboot for the sake of gaming), if you feel like you need to have even MORE control over your PC than your vanilla Debian or Fedora experiences, I guess Arch is the next step, on a side note, minimal Void Linux installation is very similar to what you get with Arch so in case you used that you already have a taste of what you’re getting into, well, plus having access to the AUR :)

    Oh also, I’m not sure about MATLAB, but Octave has been shipped as MATLAB compatible (although it haven’t been the case for me with some functionalities…) Maybe you’ll need a Windows VM if Octave wasn’t enough, or maybe it runs using WINE I haven’t bothered trying it

    Ashiette ,

    I tried using the wiki to set up nvidia but to no avail… Is there any insight you might give me ? I’m using Plasma and have a prime card (intel/nvidia)

    notTheCat ,

    wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA

    I followed the steps in the installation section then installed nvidia-prime from Arch repos, prime-run works (I set up a custom menu entry of some apps that I want to run with the NVIDIA card) , the Vulkan demo detects and runs on the NVIDIA driver even without running with prime-run (afaik Vulkan does a good job detecting all the GPUs installed), I have the same setup as you do, Plasma with (Intel iGPU + NVIDIA dGPU)

    luthis ,

    No problems that I’m aware of. I use Gnome, Firefox, and have used vscode totally fine.

    Arch is not difficult to get going.

    unionagainstdhmo OP ,
    @unionagainstdhmo@aussie.zone avatar

    Thanks everyone for your advice, I decided to install Arch, I’ve got it all set up with BTRFS and snapper with automatic snapshots through snap-pac.

    The only problems in the install were that the default BTRFS subvolume layout given by archinstall gives an @.snapshots subvolume. If you want to use snapper with the root subvolume you need to unmount and remove this subvolume so that snapper can create a new one.

    The other problem was that once the proprietary NVIDIA driver is installed gdm will force X11 still on Hybrid graphics laptops. Just had to symlink the gdm config to null which is mentioned in the wiki for drivers older than 470 on single GPU set-ups. Sorry don’t have the links on me.

    Otherwise all set up now, we’ll see how this goes

    noddy ,

    I’ve been using arch for many years now. I’ve used various distros every once in a while, but I always come back to arch. When arch break it is probably a single package that is causing the issue, and there is likely a forum post explaining how to fix it already when you have an issue. However if I manage to break ubuntu for example, I always have a bad time getting the system back up without a reinstall. I haven’t tried using BTRFS for snapshots yet, but I usually format my drive to BTRFS for new systems/reinstalls now, so I have the opportunity at least. Don’t know if snapshots would have made a difference for the GRUB issue that happened though. Thankfully it didn’t affect me as I use systemd-boot instead.

    I also use Gnome, vscode and firefox. Don’t know about matlab but there is a wiki page and an aur package, so I think it should work. For gnome if you use extensions, I recommend installing them from the aur, instead of from the web browser, as you won’t need to manually update them. For vscode, there is an aur package for the official version from microsoft, but there is also a FOSS version on the main repo (though some extensions may not work/be available out of the box on that one).

    One issue arch users may get after a while is the hard drive filling with cached packages. Pacman doesn’t delete old packages from the cache automatically, so if you never clear the cache, you will get a copy of every version of every package you’ve ever installed in the cache. I’ve made it a habit now every once in a while I’ll clear the cache, after an update and I’ve confirmed the system works after the update. There’s a command “paccache” from the “pacman-contrib” package that’s convenient for clearing cached packages.

    super_mario_69 , (edited )
    @super_mario_69@hexbear.net avatar

    I love arch and I’m incredibly biased, but here goes. I have used Arch exclusively for the past n years. All of the things you’ve mentioned will work great. The AUR absolutely rules. It’s rather similiar to Void in the sense that it’s a completely blank slate, so it’s going to be as unique an experience as you make it.

    Arch is really stable and reliable as long as you don’t break it, really. Out of the handful of times I’ve fucked up my install, all of them have been my own fault. Fortunately Arch is (relatively) easy to fix: keep a live USB on hand and chroot into your physical drive with arch-chroot and unfuck whatever needs unfucking. I haven’t ever had to completely start over from scratch a single time. It’s a learning experience!

    Go for it, I say. Try it in a VM beforehand if you gotta.

    adam ,
    @adam@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

    IMHO arch is way too overrated. It does include a lot of stuff in the repos that others don’t have, but the benefit end there in my opinion. My experience on fedora has been way better.

    Holzkohlen ,

    I really enjoy using Garuda Linux. Arch based, using btrfs with snapshots preconfigured. Most beginner friendly arch based distro IMHO. I even prefer it to EndeavourOS. I use the KDE lite version tho, not big on their theming. Garuda is also my favorite rolling release.

    Frederic ,

    No, go straight to MX Linux you’ll have Nvidia driver, and luks/btrfs and snapshot etc OOB.

    virtualbriefcase ,

    My 2c would be yes only if you’re specifically seeking out the bleeding edge and don’t mind or enjoy doing the neccesary tinkering.

    Alsp you have time in between now and a re-install I’d highly recommended trying to do you’re day to day stuff in an Arch VM for a bit and see if it works for you.

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